# How I Built a Volunteer Geographic Directory for Quran Reciters and Mosque Imams in Riyadh

Yagoob — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:27:09 +0000

Some web projects start with a business plan.

This one started with a list.

Years ago, I had a simple list of Quran reciters and mosque imams in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was useful, but like many small collections of local information, it lived mostly in files and messages rather than in a system that people could easily search.

At some point I started asking a simple question:

What if local knowledge could be turned into a searchable, geographic web directory?

That question eventually became Ebdaa Qurra, a volunteer project for documenting Quran reciters and mosque imams in Riyadh.

The interesting part wasn't building another CRUD application.

The interesting part was figuring out how to model information that is inherently local, geographic, bilingual, and constantly evolving — while keeping the technology relatively simple.

The Problem

Information about local places and people is often fragmented.

A person might know:

the name of an imam
the mosque where he leads prayers
the neighborhood where the mosque is located
the nearest Riyadh Metro station
or simply that a particular reciter is known in a certain area

But those pieces of information don't necessarily exist together in one searchable place.

Traditional search engines are very good at finding large websites.

They are not always as good at representing small pieces of local knowledge.

So I wanted to build something closer to a local knowledge graph, but without actually building a complicated graph database.

The basic relationship looked more like this:

The project eventually became Ebdaa Qurra, a volunteer-built directory that organizes information about Quran reciters and mosque imams in Riyadh, connecting people and places with neighborhoods, geographic locations, and nearby Metro stations.

DEV Community: Yagoob

# How I Built a Volunteer Geographic Directory for Quran Reciters and Mosque Imams in Riyadh